Eihwaz
yew•endurance•the threshold
In the poems the rune is called: eoh (Old English) ýr (Norwegian, Icelandic) sound «ei» ᛇ
Eihwaz comes when the old is ending and the new has no name yet.
The meaning
Eihwaz is the yew: the tree that stays green among the graves, poisonous and long-lived, rooted in the dark and reaching for the light at once. It is the backbone of things: endurance through change, strength drawn from facing an ending honestly instead of looking away. This rune stands at thresholds, in the strange hollow between who you were and who you are becoming. The door behind has closed, and the one ahead has not yet opened. It is where real change happens, and Eihwaz asks you to trust the thread that runs through it.
A modern reading, grounded in the poems below.
Reversed readings are a modern practice. As this site draws it, the rune is the same in both positions, so a reversed one does not exist for it.
For you
What ending are you being asked to face?
The poems
Eoh byþ utan unsmeþe treow,
heard hrusan fæst, hyrde fyres,
wyrtrumun underwreþyd, wyn on eþle.
The yew is a rough tree on the outside,
hard, held fast in the earth, keeper of fire,
propped up by its roots, a joy on the land.
why the poem never names it
The poem never names the rune. Each stanza is a riddle whose answer is the name, and the name printed above it in every edition was put there by a later hand.
Two Norse poems have a stanza for a rune called ýr, the yew. It is the same tree and the same sound. It is not quite the same letter: the sign that carried the name into the Viking Age came from Algiz, turned upside down. The name walked one way and the shape walked another, and both stanzas are printed on the Algiz page too, for the other reason.
Ýr er vetrgrønstr viða;
vænt er, er brennr, at sviða.
No wood holds its green through winter like the yew.
Set it burning and it crackles.
on the rhyme
The Norwegian poem is written in rhyming couplets. The second line rhymes with the first, and often that is the strongest thing connecting them. Dickins calls each couplet two semi-detached statements of a gnomic character.
Ýr er bendr bogi
ok brotgjarnt járn
ok fífu fárbauti.
gloss arcus ynglingr
Yew: a bent bow,
brittle iron,
and the giant of the arrow.
on the last two words
Each Icelandic stanza ends with two words the poem does not need. One is a Latin equivalent of the rune name, the other an Old Norse word for king beginning with the same letter. The manuscript is running a glossary and an alphabetical king-list through the poem at the same time.
where these texts come from
The earliest surviving list of this row was written in the ninth century, and it says nothing about what any rune means. Abecedarium Nordmannicum, 9th century.
Text after Dickins 1915. Checked against Halsall 1981. Translated here from the originals.
Where it comes from
Yews live for thousands of years, longer than any building, longer than most nations. The North planted them in burial grounds, where they stood green over the dead through every winter, and cut from their tough wood the finest bows. Many see in Eihwaz the world-tree itself, Yggdrasil: roots deep in the dark places, crown high in the light. On that trunk Odin hung nine nights to win the runes. It is the axis that holds the whole story upright: death and life growing from one wood, neither possible without the other.
Hyrde fyres, keeper of fire, and nobody is sure why. Yew burns hot and slow and was used to carry a flame, which is the usual guess, and it is a guess. It is one word in a tenth-century poem and there is no second witness.
The Icelandic stanza is a pun stack. Dickins notes that brotgjarnt járn, brittle iron, uses a different word ýr altogether. And fífu fárbauti, giant of the arrow, is the bow again by another route: Fárbauti is Loki's father, and his name works as a common word for giant. Three lines, three senses of one sound. This is the clearest evidence on the site that these stanzas were written by people enjoying themselves and not by priests recording a doctrine.